Buddies Travel: Myrtle Beach

History Lesson

The true story of Sports Illustrated's Myrtle Beach connection

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By Peter Finch

May 2010

Myrtle Beach boosters occasionally describe their town as the "birthplace" of Sports Illustrated. Although that's a bit of a stretch, Myrtle's Pine Lakes Country Club was the site of the magazine's first sales conference, a rah-rah event for the people who would peddle advertising in its pages, a few weeks before the premier issue came out in 1954.

John Marin, now 82, remembers it well. He was the young Time Inc. executive in charge of organizing that 60-person conference, a three-day affair that included speeches, abundant drinking, and rounds of golf at Pine Lakes and the Dunes Golf & Beach Club. "You want the right kind of launching pad for whatever you do, and Myrtle Beach was that for Sports Illustrated," recalls Marin, who's pretty sure he is the only surviving attendee. "People were so hospitable and supportive of all these nuts from New York."

Like many of his colleagues, Marin wasn't much of a golfer in those days. "Golf was something our daddies did," he says. But he credits the Myrtle trip with sparking his interest in the game. Among his career golf highlights: rounds with Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford and Clinton. Now retired after a many years in publishing, most of them at Time Inc., Marin is a member at Bel-Air Country Club in Los Angeles, where his regular group is called the "320s" (you have to be at least 80 to join the foursome).

Visitors to the newly renovated clubhouse at Pine Lakes can tour a small room devoted to news clippings and other mementos of the Sports Illustrated sales meeting. Marin hasn't been back to see the display for himself -- though he has heard all about it. Not long after it appeared, a friend called in a state of some disbelief. "John," he asked, "why the $%$# is there a plaque with your name on it in Myrtle Beach?"